


Cold Light of Day

by pellucid



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-25
Updated: 2014-02-25
Packaged: 2018-01-13 16:57:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1234087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pellucid/pseuds/pellucid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They have no script for this, for what comes after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Light of Day

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through 4.10 "Revelations." I had mixed feelings about Caprica/Tigh at the time, and even more mixed feelings looking back. But I think the fic holds up decently as a character study of Tigh in that moment. Beta by gabolange.
> 
> Written in June 2008.

\--  
Saul feels her walk up to him, touch his sleeve. He doesn't turn away, and she moves in close, the bleak wind tossing her hair against his cheek. She's taller than he thought, he observes, looking at her for the first time in open air. Taller than Ellen, his mind corrects. He takes her hand.

He didn't mean to lead them here, not to this waste of a planet. He didn't mean to lead them anywhere. He was never supposed to be anything more than Saul Tigh, just a soldier doing his job. 

People wander across the barren beach, and he avoids looking at Tyrol, Anders, and Tory. They've done this, he thinks. All of it a frakking joke. Her fingers curl around his more tightly, as though she knows what he's thinking—and maybe she does; he still doesn't understand how their brains work. He doesn't let go.

They walk together back to a Raptor, past Bill and Roslin, each with an arm around the other as they speak with D'Anna, Starbuck, and Apollo. He overhears something about planetary reconnaissance and wonders briefly if he should be helping. He's done enough, too much, without even trying. They'll be better off without him.

He helps her into the Raptor, and they return to _Galactica_ , to his quarters, to his bed. Neither of them speaks.

\--

"You didn't tell me," she says, hours later. Her voice isn't quite accusatory, just soft and close as she lies in his arms. They have no script for this, for what comes after. 

He's glad she doesn't finish the sentence: you didn't tell me you're a Cylon. One of the revered Final Five. The words have escaped his own lips, and he can almost hold them in his mind. But he can't yet bear to hear them from others. "Didn't tell you what?" he feigns. 

"Saul," she says. He thinks about networked brains, information jumping across a Cylon wireless connection. He knows it doesn't actually work that way, yet they both know what the other isn't saying. I am a Cylon, he thinks, practicing. It's a sentence he will never speak easily. 

He opens his eyes and is somehow unsurprised to see her. He hasn't seen Ellen at all today, and that's something else that has changed. All of his fantasies blown to bits in a matter of hours: he's a Cylon, Ellen's dead, Earth's a joke. He's never dealt very well with reality.

"Saul?" she asks again, running a hand up his arm, caressing his shoulder. 

"I didn't know how to tell you," he answers. "I don't know how—" He stops, climbs out of bed, pulls on his shorts, and pours drinks for both of them. 

"How to what?" She wraps herself in the bedsheet, follows him to the table. She doesn't touch her drink as he knocks his back and pours himself another. Clarity is impossible, so he seeks its opposite.

"How to be a frakking Cylon," he snaps. In one perfect moment, he thought he knew. He confessed to Bill and stood in an airlock and thought he knew how to die as a Cylon. He doesn't know how to live as one.

She presses her lips together and nods, brushes a piece of hair out of her eye. "Maybe you just need to be yourself," she says slowly. 

He drains the drink he poured for her but puts the bottle away. Be himself. He snorts at the absurdity. "Where are you staying?" he asks, changing the subject.

She shrugs. She hasn't stayed anywhere since someone let her out of the brig, since they all went looking for their new home and came up empty. "I don't know."

"I suppose you can stay here," he finds himself saying. "If you want." The place lost Ellen's feel and scent long ago. She might stay here as well as anywhere else.

"Okay," she answers. "Thank you."

\--

Bill sends for him the following morning. Saul considers not wearing his uniform, then puts it on when he can't find appropriate civilian clothes. It doesn't feel like a decision, but Bill will read it that way.

Bill's quarters are a mess, paper littering the desk and tables, books thrown haphazardly on the floor, teacups sitting on the floor by the couch. He'd heard that Bill trashed the place, and suspects the debris was swept aside as the space was used for some kind of marathon strategy session. The president isn't there, but he sees evidence of her in this space again: her shoes kicked under the table, her jacket across the back of a chair, a scarf tucked in a corner of the couch. Saul imagines his own quarters once again strewn with women's things, then wonders if she even owns anything to leave. He's only known her in the empty brig.

Bill looks exhausted—unshaven, rumpled hair, jacket unbuttoned. Saul is sure he hasn't slept.

"Colonel," Bill addresses him, and Saul instinctively stands straighter.

"You wanted to see me?" He thinks about appending "sir" or "Bill" but can't decide which.

Bill motions for him to sit. "I, uh—" He breaks off, removes his glasses and rubs his face. "Hell, Saul." Bill doesn't know what to say. Saul wonders if this meeting was even Bill's idea at all, or if Roslin talked him into it.

Saul leans his head against the back of the couch and closes his eye. "I wish I knew what to tell you," he says.

"You're a Cylon."

"Yes." Somehow it's easier to hear it from Bill than anyone else. 

Bill sighs beside him. "Okay," he says softly. They sit in silence for a few minutes before Bill speaks again. "What are you going to do now?"

Saul sits up to look at him. "I have no idea," he answers honestly. When he makes decisions he fraks them up. He's always preferred just to do what he's told, and he's not even very good at that. 

Bill nods. "What are any of us going to do?" he muses. "The planet… We've got recon missions underway. Looks like there are some habitable areas, away from what were the major cities. Vegetation, safe radiation levels. I don't know. It's not like we have anywhere else to go. There was never a plan after this."

"What do you need me to do?" he asks. He hadn't intended to volunteer, but this he knows for certain: he will always do whatever Bill Adama asks of him. 

Bill looks surprised. "I don't know yet. Laura wants to wait until the recon is finished before making a decision. But you're—we have your support?"

"You've always had my support." And this is true, he thinks, though Bill may not understand it, may see only betrayal for a long time to come.

Bill doesn't look entirely convinced, but he nods anyway. Bill stands, and Saul does the same. "I should go. Laura had an appointment with Cottle for a treatment, and I promised—" His eyes flit toward the hatch. 

"Right," Saul says. "How's she doing? With the planet and everything?" He notes absently that neither of them will call it "Earth." 

"She's all right, I think. Shaken, but—" He looks sheepish. "Better than me, anyway."

"She's always been stronger than you."

Bill smiles faintly, concedes the point. "The Cy-, your, uh—"

"Caprica," Saul interrupts.

"What?"

"Her name. She calls herself Caprica," he explains, and is startled to realize it's the first time he's said it aloud.

"Ah, right," Bill replies awkwardly. "How is she taking everything?"

"I don't really know."

There's a familiar flash in Bill's face, and for a moment they're just two men having trouble with women. "Maybe you should try to find out."

\--

At first he thinks she's gone when he returns to his quarters, but then he hears her in the head, vomiting.

"You all right?" he asks, knocking.

He hears fumbling inside, and a moment later she slides the door open. She's a bit ashen and smiles weakly. "Fine," she answers. "It's just morning sickness. Dr. Cottle says..."

And he can see her mouth continuing to move, knows she's explaining things about doctor's appointments and trimesters, and he can't hear her above his deafening panic. He thinks of leaving, doesn't know where he would go, and suddenly she spins back to the toilet, sick again.

This he knows how to do. Ellen after too many drinks, more times than he can count, and he always took care of her, even when he could scarcely care for himself. He finds a clean washcloth, fills a glass with water, and kneels behind her, running a hand up and down her spine. She takes the washcloth and water as she sits back and looks at him curiously. 

He sees her the whole time. The habit he learned from Ellen, but the woman sitting on the floor of his head, wearing his own tanks and shorts, is not Ellen. This is reality.

"Caprica," he says, experimentally.

She raises her eyebrows in surprise.

"Is that," he begins, uncertain. "Do you have another name?"

She looks over his shoulder, as though studying a spot on the wall. "Not really. There was a name, once, when I first met Gaius. He never used it. And I was a different person then."

"A different body," Saul says, feeling slightly squeamish himself.

She pulls her lips between her teeth and then looks at him. "That too."

They sit in silence for a while, until she stands, announcing that the nausea seems to have passed. He follows her back into the main room.

"How long until—" he breaks off, gesturing vaguely toward her abdomen.

Her smile is pleased but a little indulgent, and he suspects this is information he wasn't listening to earlier. "Less than seven months, Dr. Cottle thinks," she answers hesitantly.

He nods slowly. There is time, he thinks. Time to breathe, to figure this out. "Okay," he says. "Okay."


End file.
